In Pursuit Of or Flight From Holy Insecurity : "The Edge Is What I Have:" - Walking Thru Views Past From Present (Very) Old-ing Age

Rooftop snap. East Village, NYC. June 2024

[Note: All photos, even the quotes - screen grabbed - are by moi.  Click onto a photo to enlarge it. - W. F.]

"Yourself no doubt

looking like one

who has been a great beauty." - Charles Reznikoff 

"It seemed like the gargoyles of Notre Dame/ Started yelping." - Vladimir Mayakovsky, from "A Cloud In Trousers"

In Pursuit or Flight from "holy insecurity" - Martin Buber's sum of his philosophy.

1998 or 9, I was in Mirepoix, France near the Pyrenees...went into the massive cathedral there and greatly enjoyed this seated character...I got a post card of him and knew that for me he represented the shadow of the psychoanalyst/therapist...if one counsels, shrinks, helps in such a capacity then one must must must locate this cat within, the shadow of counseling/counselor or he/she's bound to show up in session and then there's a whole lotta work to do.

So did, or started, earnest, burntish, TCHAIKOVSKY tattooed where sun ain't shown, "Pathetique" the middle name so, yeah. I did. To NYC from Blue Ridge broken edges fled. For Harlem, West 142nd, off Broadway. 1980 ought 1.

Forced out of orchards and streams to Hudson Rio nigh cuz someone or some malformed thing in me had to go, to flower-wither, to summarily croak, so plans were made whence and whither, lodgings arranged, Harlem 1980, Koch era, the internal wilderness wander further ensuing urbanly hardcore, Basho's book in my coat pocket just in case I needed a reminding map, in upper-upper Manhattan where mad Garcia Lorca once fled the sorrowful fountains of Spain to roam awhile before his return to yellow feathered assasins and an invisible grave,

"...some say the crime was in Granada" :
Friends, carve a monument
out of dream stone
for the poet in the Alhambra,
over a fountain where the grieving water
shall say forever:

The crime was in Granada, his Granada."
- Antonio Machado, from "The Crime Was In Granada"

I was "spelled" like Lorca by old bricks squalid beauty grimed, each a story told, a private gesture open to witness, mud memory mute and chrysos, sonambulant subway pitching interminably forward, graffiti scrawls clutching after a bit of fame or notoriety into what was still a pandemonium most pentecostal long ranting after dark, jazz, salsa, merengue nights gore and glory dispatched from cars, windows, stoops, sidewalks, "Thriller" and Tina Turner's question "what's love got tah do with it" my new enforced mountain-exile meditation - children's play, all ages, 3 a.m. hydrant fountains bodies hot hard in lamp glow orange apocalypse by river curl following apparitions native barks and Dutch long ships sails-full passing West 142nd, blocks south looms Cathedral Divine Saint John's hang, just beyond reach of workers, trabajadores, immigrant occupants who north of 116th street earnestly try to migrate joys few coins rolling in gutters, millions passed and passing by overlooking the Christ, hungry abject crowds, slogging for the American dream,

"I have the money and can pay for the past." - Richard Hugo

Wasn't all this redeemed/revalued a long Palestine ago? The crysos of Church and churches remains more that of fools and not of the Christos. There's much to blame. Still, I'm a gargoyle perched-a-ledge mis-churched and worn, God of the Western and American world stuck in my craw, a lightning bolt bolted to my left paw beside near-dead Aquinas-Saint about himself/his work lifelong, the Summa and more - the Church more in mind and himself in terms of the real value of all his theologizing - "All straw! All straw!" wrote he about all his writing a year before he died , and never spoke or wrote a word more.

I shall be dirty with righteous indigence, 
only the gods to blame - they love a good 
argument anyway. Why should I disappoint? 

“... only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness.” - Carl Jung, from Symbols of Transformation

A Straw Man Cometh More Scare Than Crow

For this reason though, post-Christian, pre-Manhattan, I had hid, nay, sequestered mad-enough in mountains tall, stalled, a being-not-yet. Bequestered and confundidated. Hiding out in Nature's beauty was all I then could do. So I waited for Mister Godot. Until He showed up a cheap bordeaux would do. And reading the nights slowly through.

Till the "Go way" notice came.

And I went. Skidaddle n addled, "thrown" as Sartre would say, into voiditude despite uncountable and accounted for, meaning-wise, filler.  

"Spilled" nor "spat", I di'nt stay where weren't wanted so packed the Chevy van and rattled north to Manhattan - a kind of suicide since having tried to leap off a cliff in the Blue Ridge intent to end it all, 

when, sudden, just before stepping off to finish the "thrown" "spilled" "spatitudeinous-ness mess", I heard behind me a male voice say, OUTLOUD (twas in my head but externalized as psyche does do),

"You know you are a dead man already."

WHAT? WHO? WHERE? - me.

Spin stun spun (not spit or spat) around to see what man spoke so near to my right ear.

NO ONE THERE. NARY, I'll swan.

Sez he- "If you're ready to jump, and you are, the decision's made,

you are a dead man already.

Me (thinking) - OK (makes sense sorta re: to mortar or not) but what's going on? How can....

Sez he - "So you're dead, you've lost it all,

so what is the riskiest thing you can go after since you are now, dead, risking nothing.

Me - Hmmmmmm. I slow ponder, but in nanoseconds.

I finally hear myself say out loud - "New York City [really was/is a kind of suicide]."

"Well?" - sez He.

In that cliff's edge razzle I slowly backed away, be-stounded, relievéd, knew I would have to do "the deed", pack up my toil and tent and hie thee hence. Get off the barbed fence and head out, rust or bust, wing dinged and a pauper's prayer-ISH, for North. Or Nawth. Forsooth for forsaken missing a tooth, mawish, mawkish, van's spark plugs stuttering all the way. Cough cough chuggin' tepid roadside coughEE, Brewer and Shipley cassette on endless play - Rock Me On the Water:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMuzOR3Z-w

My good friends there in Blue Ridge were not at all happy though they knew of my depression and grief.

Funny (I think it is) story re: them friends, a year after my bum's stagger and dodging in NYC, called me on the telly and asked me how my writing was going (I did then, do still) be a writer somehow:

"Great," I replied, "really great - I write checks and suicide notes but not necessarily in that order."

True dat.

I left for NYC 3 months after the VOICE intervened, January 2nd.

Now. The Edge Man at the cliff knew me intimately since he used the phrase re: "taking a risk, THE risk"which meant and still means much to me.

I had been reading Charles Olson's Maximus Poems for months, trying to ken what indeed he/they were all about but having at it despite befuddlement. I mostly jot down lines and such that rang out or in or sang to me.

One of the first, and fateful, lines that moved me to tears and a kind of shame gethering around me came towards the end of the first Maximus poem. when Olson writes:

"He can take no risk that matters / the risk of beauty most of all"

BAM. Olson has called me out and named the calling, quest for me, take "the risk that then and now matters" - the risk beauty most of all.

So, at the cliff's edge began the stagger, the stall, ever falling forward and, ofttimes, on my face, but toward beauty however that would shake or bake or show in terms of my own writerly and other thralls and palls of it, the "B".

SNIPT TEXTS for CONTEXT

"I am old enough now to realize we are all trying to live sufficiently long to see the self come true. None of us is likely to make it. Therefore we invent selves, we prance and pose and dream and labor, confirming what we might be by what others think we are and by what we see we have been."
- Dave Smith, "A Secret You Can't Break Free

"Humanity, is on the way, always moving towards something. At least, we should be. The classic theological concept for this is 'Homo Viator', or Man on the Way [Man the Flier]. For life is a journey, an adventure that we are always a part of. We do not choose to be on the way, it is our existential situation. We are not at home, we are are on the way home....We long to be at home, in a place of comfort, yet we are not." - Dan Jesse

'"... from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation.... A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the ' - James Joyce

"We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. We are what we are by what we came from. We have a beginning as we have an end. There was a time that was not our time. We hear of it from those who are older than we; we read about it in history books...It is hard for us to imagine our 'being-no-more.' It is equally difficult to imagine our 'being-not-yet'. " - Paul Tillich

That place among the rocks—Is is a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke"

"I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184). Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as this one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ is no ‘happy middle’ which ignores the reality of paradox and contradiction in order to escape from the suffering they produce. It is rather a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives -- I and Thou, love and justice, dependence and freedom, the love of God and the fear of God, passion and direction, good and evil, unity and duality." -- from Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman.

"The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet," he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable."

CODA Chinois

I discovered Chinese poets of yore in those mouuts, welcomed me for a while then kicked me OUT. Found a book at the bookstore in Asheville, NC, new, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, an anthology of around one thousand Chinese poems translated into English. Thumbed through it, wow wow wow, purchased it though it meant peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of the week, a worthy sacrifice it was, a thick heavy tome carried with me on hikes for dips in, Chinese poets of old to savor and, happily, quickly, paging here and there, one poet, now a thoughtful lifelong companion through all cycles so far lived, Liu Tsung-yuan (773 - 819), became, and still is, for me a human homing-device, an in-the-moment course correction when intercourse with the world, and my pitiable self, was then, and betimes still is (like NOW) just too too much to bear.

In the late '70's old Liu would lift me out of pathetic self muck, gather my scattered bones from the sandy bottom of Scowler's Creek as he, Liu, did the flood scattered bones of old Heng the faithful hired hand whose name means "persevering," and orient p-p-perseverating me toward the western woods,

Feeling Old Age

I've always known that old age would arrive,
and suddenly now I witness its encroach.
This year, luckily, I've not weakened much
but gradually it comes to seek me out.
Teeth scattered, hair grown short,
To run or hurry, I haven't the strength.
So, I cry, what's to be done!
And yet, why should I suffer?
P'eng-tsu and Lao Tzu no more exist',
Chuang Tzu and K'ung Tzu too are gone.
Of those whom the ancients called 'immortal saints'
not one is left today.

I only wish for fine wine
and friends who will often help me pour.
Now that spring is drawing to a close -
and peach and plum produce abundant shade
and the sun lights up the azure sky and
far, far, the homeward goose cries,
I step outside, greeting those I love,
and climb to the western woods with the aid of my staff.

Singing out loud is enough to cheer me up;
the ancient hymns have overtones.

Fragment for old Han Shan whose name is Cold Mountain - 

[Dates of his life are uncertain, anywhere from 5th to 9th century A.D.] 

If stopped and questioned at the Gate to 
Yellow Spring, I'll blame you, old Ghost 
of too many former selves, a meandering 
rumor still muttering the old hymns, who 
grants me permission the entrance to boldly storm. 

Between what these final breaths remain and 
the horizon closing in, my fingers still work. 

On behalf of all sentient beings I will plead 
the case. 

I'll write until the quill is taken from my cold hand.  

Even then I shall be dirty with righteous indigence, 
only the gods to blame - they love a good 
argument anyway. Why should I disappoint? 

In dying I become human through and through 
which comes from doing. 

Be damned and done with mirrors and pockets, 
a man can curse at the end having earned the 
right to do so - 

a wink and a 
grin rehearsed, 
then come the flies. 
Whose hands shall 
shoo them, whose 
hands un-shoe him 
and run quickly 
into day? 

I leave my poems just as they are. 
When I'm gone let the worms correct 
spelling and punctuation. 

Meanwhile beneath willow tips 
I will tease slowly the grasses to laughter 

which is the only horizon I have known. 

Travelin' Shoes - Chambers Brothers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ngbZgx9EDY

Necromancing Into the Noo-Millennium - On Getting Revved & Reviled Up or How I Came By My Allergic Reaction to the New Age Gnostics Honerst-ly (a few fragments)

Jet lagged - London, on the bench where

T. S. Eliot used to sit on his lunch break -

August 2016

But wherefore could I not pronounce 'Amen'? 

I have most need of blessing and 'Amen' stuck in my throat" —William Shakespeare, from Macbeth 

A man will go far to find out who he is. —Theodore Roethke, from "In a Dark Time" 

I'm gonna ride to the West where the fence commences

and gaze at the moon till I lose my senses. —from the song, "Don't Fence Me In"

I am moved by fancies that curl

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing. - T. S. Eliot, from "Preludes"

"O starry spangled shock of mercy!"

- Allen Ginsberg, from HOWL

"Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" - Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 344, Para 652.

1

Necromancy, anyone? the newest (ancient) version, one of the post postmodern variants in the collective consciousness (verily mugged by the unconscious aka archetypal) is the literal belief in ETs, aliens, flying saucers or, more current to techne aka movie/series variations in, the new religion named ENTERTAINMENT, INC. aka the real "gods" (those with "mana" - see Carl Jung - google it) -

throw in AI now and forever (no escape - now THAT, AI, is the very real (surreal) intra-terrestrial now gone EXTRA) - that these ETs (but there are bad ones, too, or so channelers have indicated, seems "good" and "evil" extend throughout the multiverse which conflicts with pop New Age disbelief in "evil" but, they, rather, are Catholics re: the matter viz "privatio boni" (look it up, google it) meaning "the diminishment of good" - an early Greek strophe blown into greater proportions by the Gnostics which truly are the "specters" behiind, beneath, not very well hidden, in New Age garbed and feathered variations or, as sketched above, way way techne high tech futuristic disguises cuz our new Messiahs are like the old ones and they comes from the skies-es:

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world—all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. - Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 99".

OY. But back to the past, way past, which is all our wayward now, the odious word au current "trending" a new god of the fleeting here today gone instantly cuz mores the trend or, the word I prefers is - MAYA - delusion, illusion, unreal at no-base except for what Heraclitus pointed out millennia ago aka "all is flux" "can't step into the same maya twice, or one can but should not pour concrete into maya and plant a flag and stake an ontological, even an epistemological claim in the "mind, mind has mountains, no man fathomed (Hopkins)" reification wars

for torsion's the realer "god" so turn up the volume at Club Nekyia and do the twist, do the shout, or okey dokey hokey pokey, Little Richard a necessary alien, of course, singing, "Twist and Shout".

Google "Jung + nekyia" or "Edward F. Edinger + nekyia" and discover that what is really going on re: popular religion (which is the old religions) and channeling, now mediumship (yawn), is all manifestations of, derived from, "Psyche" - yes, google "Carl Jung + psyche" and then, if ye wish or swish

"Come down off your throne and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting so long
Somebody holds the key
Well I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home

Come down on your own and leave your body alone
Somebody must change
You are the reason I've been waiting all these years
Somebody holds the key
But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home

But I can't find my way home x 3

Still I can't find my way home
And I ain't done nothing wrong
But I can't find my way home.

Aptly named, Blind Faith:

Blind Faith ~ Can't Find My Way Home ~ (Original Acoustic Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlLBs6YawM

2 Amplification/Expansion, Return to Terra (In)Firma

"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God Himself. The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point. The world is not infinite; it is a sphere." - Wallace Fowlie, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood"

S'bout "finding our way home" by the voyage, the launching forth or aft - just get launched.

Wallace Fowlie, literature professor and writer of renown re: French writers especially, his book, first one, on Artur Rimbaud, "Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood", launched me further especially in the last chapter "Myth" in the section titled "The Myth of the Voyage" which spoke very much to me the inner beseecher compulsively marking distance by books, by tears, by dreams, a "boomer dog (more the mutt than the pedigreed cur)" circling endlessly for the settling spot but forever endlessly circling having come to understand that circling is a home of sorts, too.

Feet forget what they are at times, or better, bums for sitting... for Fowlie re: Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre"(Drunken Boat poetry),

"the meaning of the voyage accomplished by the poet is explained in the immemorial desire of men to deliver the world. They depart for the liberation of the world is the explicit role of the hero, and the implicit role of the poet and of all people...the poet is always a voyager...but his exploration of the world is that of the subconscious...the familiar world is always in discredit with poets. They undertake their voyage without knowing whether it is for a conquest or for a flight. But it is certain that a profound spiritual motivation lies in the genesis of each voyage: the reconciliation between life and "the dream of life"...Don Quixote started out to deliver the world and stumbled over the first pebbles on the road. More than all others perhaps, Don Quixote illustrates the abyss or the conflict which exists between the greatness of man's desires and the ridiculousness of his accomplishments.

To equate one's dream would be for man to attain to the state of superman, because his dream exceeds even the greatness of his heart. The dream of man inevitably contains some aspect of the absolute: absolute of sentiments or actions."

"...But the legend of places is not so indecipherable as the myth of the heart. Space torments us as the symbol of that mystery to traverse before we can arrive at God...The whole universe must be known first, and then conquered. But Rimbaud's voyage...brought him back to the starting point.

The world is not infinite; it is a sphere."

"But the myth of the voyage is not concealed in the marine monsters of a Melville or in the snow-covered green nights of a Rimbaud. It is in man's primal desire to depart, in his first effort toward liberation. The poetry of the myth in Rimbaud is that instant when his boat no longer feels itself guided by hauler. It is the same intent in Mallarme when his clown plunges his fist through the tent wall and makes a window. The myth of the voyage is, in each man, the secret desire to leave for that unrealizable object which barricades him from life."

Fowlie goes on to describe voyage as a falling to earth, always, always falling and meeting the earth and then quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's 5th Duino Elegy inspired by Picasso's Les Saltimbanques:

You, that fall with the thus
only fruits know, unripe,
daily a hundred times from the tree
of mutually built up motion."

Overripe persimmons. Ville de San-Mont, Gers, France. 

Christmas 2019

And on and on Fowlie goes...breathtakingly...it's all so exquisite one can barely take in a sentence or two and then is fed another rich meal...his words, I believe, explain all our travels where one is, alien, confronted yet again with the "unrealizable object which barricades one from life."

And yet gives a life after all is said and done.

Odysseus's last voyage was revealed to him in a vision midway into his voyage...Tiresius, the blind seer, revealed to him the vision of his ultimate end, as an old man he would hew a tree, shape a large oar for going to sea then turn away yet again, one last time, from the familiar wife, land, and his beloved sea. He was to walk inland into the unknown region where he would eventually encounter people who had no knowledge of the sea at all. And there among them he must plant the oar in the soil where eventually the oar would turn into a tree.

Something about roots laid...and eventually a falling of fruit and the ensuing voyage of the land-locked ones having heard from Odysseus of the once rumored sea in their dreams.

Much much to be said here but will cease and desist.

At least I can, unlike the toxic cypher imaged below, always acting out in the grip of the dark side of the archetype - POWER - possessing and puppeteering him. He/IT, of course, is all our disowned shadow of one flavor or another, projected, and so this chin jutter, chin mancer, confronts one and all, the polis; the melting pot is an alchemical vessel where all manner of volatile contrarieties mixed together are at high boil in order to eventually render that one distilled drop of "agua permanans (pure water), the pearl of great price, the gold derived from the rough ore, and other images conjured for millennia of something "eternal" "essential".

***

To read more re: human-stagger ventures as and with shadow, the "goon" that Nature is in all us we, the alter brained ego/self that contends with all our "hairy giggly meatedness" (Da Free John's humorous and pathetic description), human gods who do despair, says Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death (must read this book!), because, yes, we humaniacs are indeed capable of miracles of invention and imagination (codependent they are) - art, music, culture all kinds but, alas, we are "gods who shit". We limbo in heights and depths, peaks and vales, strive after opposites, preferring heights while eschewing the depths. We are suspended, or so it feels and is often imaged, between and between, yearning to go up, to become sublime but

Ether needs the balance of Nether. And vicer Werther (tee hee).

Not either/or (read Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" for getting a lay of the land there). And none of this is for elaborate "spiritual" (a much castrated word, an adulteration of confabulation and fluff) entertainments with bells and whistles and a weekend workshop on "dancing with one's gremlins". OY!!!

One can see just how effective "Boomer" fascination/mugging by the unconscious via '60's Castaneda/psychedelics off to the East wave moved the consciousness wheel - NOT. Look at the face blow. Time to return to Kansas, eyes wide. Shoulders to the wheel. Feet on the earth.

Mabel Mercer Live At Town Hall - Both Sides Now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv6G9Z5-SD8&list=PL8GLQabuo5FyGOQ54IOUPxQlyPkiwwz-S

The link in the comment section below is to a free (and safe to) download copy of Jung's Nietzsche/Zarathustra Seminars Vols. 1 and 2 in one volume. To read re: the above proceed immediately to Vol. 2 to Lecture II October 26, 1938. Jung will speak extensively re: Nietzsche's "being mugged" (my description of it) by the archetypal, becoming massively inflated, and his eventual "dismemberment" psychologically. This, I believe, my own opinion but received and experienced enough to have one on this, is what is going on nationally and globally. Nations have psyches and many of the first world are mugged by the unconscious, by archetypes which do inflate/unground and puff up into messianic proportions who and how such experience them/its place, status, roll in the world. It ye old "chosen people" sin-drome. God's/gods own special group. And it is ANCIENT. Comes with the reptilian brain contending with the new brain but that's another story for another time. If ever. Here. At least from me.

Is it "we're not in Kansas anymore, Godzilla?"

Or is it "Kansas is too too much with us so get an education, get a psychoanalysts and do the modern/postmodern descent/nekyia into the Depths that Dante dove, that Carl Jung dove into and made more than ample notes of. A Bestseller approach to this is laughable but has made millions and millions of dollars which says to me that folks are hungry for authentic embodiedment, soulfully so, but the market has the corner on the "new" gluttony, "spirituality" and so Trumps and mad-hatters come marching in.

*

Stevie Winwood's solo version of his composition, "Can'f Find My Way Home":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlLBs6YawM

What the Orphan Knows About Light - Why Baby Blue's Going On Departures Away from Blisstopia

REPRISE REPOST OF 01/25/2012 ESSAY 

[Mexico City Twilight. Photo by Warren Falcon

CLICK on photos to enlarge them]

Pretexts to season the offering below giving contexts to massive contrasts :

"We love what we lack." - Edward Edinger

"Who has twisted us like this, so that--
no matter what we do--we have the bearing
of a man going away...so we live,
forever saying farewell." - Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” - C.G. Jung, this was carved by Jung on a stone at his tower in Bollingen

"What I find most astonishing--besides that belief of mine, which never ceases to surprise me by the very fact of its surprising lack of unpleasantness, the belief that I might very easily, as they say--lose my mind one day, not that I suspect that I am about to or am even...nearby...for I'm not that sort; merely that it is not beyond...happening: some gentle loosening of the moorings sending the balloon adrift..." - Edward Albee. A Delicate Balance.

"If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything." - Hermann Hesse

**

for Anna Kamienska

'I don't believe in the other world...But I don't believe in this one either unless it's pierced by light.' - A. Kamienska

Seems I've been leaving a lot, a life theme really--departure. I was born after only 4 hours of labor. Postpartum began the going, going, adios, get me outta here to some where and there which I shall probably be leaving again soon enough--a puer thing?. Still, I'm halitose which belies some earthiness. Now, finally, maybe, I am departing the grandiose search, a Chaplin-esque lurch for omnipotence in the falling apart world, the ceiling collapsing all around in the most recent dream, a younger me suffocating a sleeping old man - me.

Oh snap! Miasma, I mean, my asthma has been severe for the past two weeks now. Duh. Here we go. Dreams are damned good, know how to give the real story in all the wheeze and "god-almightiness if you pleez." I've been "working air" as friend Joan says of asthma, the work it becomes to breathe makes one very present, concrete. And blue. And the dream provides some meaning to asthma other than just outer dust and a consumptive spirit: there's grief afoot. Grief is about departure, yes? And as anyone who knows me or reads some of the newsletters or essays here, I give much weight to dreams, the one real "thing" that seems to really mean something in all the dumbshow of my grab-atting and scrab-ladder balancing acts, holding on to chandelier which is grandiose lighting, for sure. Oy. Humbling.

Around the time of an unpleasant and inevitable "parting of the ways" from a religious facility I once taught in, I dreamed of a gigantic, overladen, bleacher-like altar which collapses. Trungpa Rimpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist guru/teacher, writes incisively about the "spiritual antique shop" which much American "baby boomer religiosity" has become and is even more so now (note that Trungpa took full advantage of the "spiritual antique shop" and the curiosity of the boomers searching for something other than variations of Christianity and the spiritless positivism of modern science). The altar in my dream was jammed with collective symbols, statuary, rocks, crystals, projected-upon objects of desired power indicating some spiritual arrival, all purchased in spiritual "supermarkets" for the hungry-ghost "boomer" consumers residing at the polluted Western pool of Narcissus, long gazing, addicted, at selves reflected but not enfleshed, real, substantial.


I have most certainly spent way too much time in this "antique shop" (and beside the pool) where one commits to the spiritual delectables displayed for purchase as one does to the hankering of the day for a certain food item, today the potato salad is "it" but tomorrow "it" may be the tuna tartar and on and on, the only commitment is to taste the various offerings. This is puer religion at its "best or worst," depending on how you look at it, the puer (the eternal child) tastes but rarely commits, such is "boomer religiosity." There are, of course, exceptions to the puerish samplers in the antique shop (I've nibbled and dabbled, too, a serious but dallying dilettante), those who have committed to one chosen path who actually fall into the pool of Narcissus and sink to the depths in order to find themselves more truly. Such sinking is initiation into self knowing which means the death of faces and egoic embraces of identity which are (grown) false to fact, no longer authentic, which are shed in the process of self-possession. Jungian analyst and writer, Edward Edinger, speaks of the myth of Narcissus (and narcissism) as the condition of being alienated from the self:

"Narcissus represents the alienated ego that cannot love ... because it is not yet related to itself. To fall in love with the reflected image of oneself can only mean that one does not yet possess oneself. Narcissus yearns to unite with himself just because he is alienated from his own being...we love what we lack. Narcissism in its original mythological implications is thus not a needless excess of self-love but rather just the opposite, a frustrated longing for a self-possession which does not yet exist. The solution of the problem of Narcissus is the fulfillment of self-love rather than its renunciation. We meet here a common error of the moralizing ego which tries to create a loving personality by extirpating self-love. This is a profound psychological mistake and only causes a psychic split. Fulfilled self-love is a prerequisite to the genuine love of any object, and to the flow of psychic energy in general" (p. 161).

This dream altar described above, a version of the pool of Narcissus, was located in the meeting space of the religious facility. The over-burdened altar began to sway, the over burdening being the Narcissus weight of need for self-knowing projected upon the objects/images/totems, et. al. in hopes of gaining self-love, for "fulfilled self-love is a prerequisite to the genuine love of any object, and to the flow of psychic energy in general."

I knew there was no way I could prevent the altar from falling though I tried (in Chaplin-esque fashion recalling the dream now). As it swayed and shook, groaned and rattled, I tried to stabilize it but nothing doing. It was going down. Just as it teetered on the verge of total collapse I impulsively reached out to grab something from the altar, to salvage something. I remember seeing a Buddha head serenely tilting sideways mid-fall but my hand bypassed that beauty and impulsively grabbed instead a little souvenir from Switzerland, from the Western world, a tiny beer stein. And down went the altar into a pile of rubble and dust.

I stood there in my underwear, an "inconvenient truth" more naked than not, which dreams freely dole out, brutal truth, cold and precise, without mercy, BEHOLD: tighty whiteys, covered with dust billowing up from the rubble. Bewildered, I held the little stein tightly in my hand. In walked two of the faculty whom I experiences as most inflated and overly-identified with the guru/messiah projections they pulled for and got from students and aping disciples. Sneering at me, noses literally up in the air (it wasn't the dust), they passed me by, heads turned away in shunning fashion. I noted that there was no charge at all, no feeling either way about them as they passed. They were dumb but colorful hobby fish in a child's small aquarium.  Slicking back my own fins and gills, I happily walked to the front door to fresh air, dry land, terra firma, REALITY; blinking Chaplin-esquely, I opened the door, brushed the altar dust off my feet in good New Testament fashion, stepped over the threshold into the busy street, and left once and for all thinking, "Now, you must get some clothes on and then make something of this stein. No turning back which would be regressive sure." While waking out of the dream I heard within the words of a Bob Dylan song, my favorite, "You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last/But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast/Yonder stands your orphan with his gun/Crying like a fire in the sun/Look out the saints are comin’ through...strike another match, go start anew...It's all over now, Baby Blue."

Well, at least there is a match, what remains a'pocket. Grabbed stein in hand. Match stricken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1jMQyJxTmI

Even so, departures are not easy. They are damned hard. The firing and the collapse came at the end of what had already been occurring in me for at least 6 or 7 years before the actual denouement. Good riddance to all that. But the inner departure has been slow, more a "ridding, here, there, now and then," as there is that inner Chaplin (a play, perhaps, upon "chaplain" since it was a religious institution I had taught in after all, and I am a now, ironically, a titled "reverend") who is so naively, bravely invested in doing the impossible, attempting, at least, to keep the ceiling I, a personal sky, and the sky from falling, as well as that overly laden altar crumpled in his head and heart.

Symbolism of Beer, Stein/Stone, Dust, White and Orphan


Now. I don't really like beer. I'll drink it if I must, a dark bitter brew goes down best but it's not my beverage of love or choice at all. I'm a wine drinker. Some tequila makes me scrappy but happy. However, I did not grab a chalice from the altar, nor a shot glass. I grabbed the little stein, a Swiss stein, and in my undies headed away from the New Ager-gods-and-goddesses-R-us comic book illustrated, fluffy world, yet another "spiritual province" tried, tasted, and come to not much at all in terms of planting a spiritual identity flag, pouring concrete around it and proclaiming a temple my own. Makes sense though, the effort, to balance the negative inflation ("I am a worm, a wretch) of Christianity I was fed and fed upon as a kid a la Calvinism and other conservative flavors served up from Catholic to Protestant. Low to high, mud to sky, as James Hillman says in his "Puer Papers" book, "Peaks and vales." Exhausting. Draining. Notice, too, how it's all vertical, up and down which are the same thing depending on where one is heading on the heavenly ladder. Notice there is no horizontal, or not much value given to that dimension. It is, rather, to be escaped, risen above, sublimated, transcended.


But the stein means "stone" in German. And a stone implies weight and ground. Horizontal. And horizon. And Switzerland, peaks and vales notwithstanding, of course, is the very palpable land of Carl Jung who I am convinced is what this grab-stein is all about - Jungian psychology and dreams, a non-grandiose working and living out of and within "the symbolic life" on solid ground, the good earth, the creative play implied in the heady joy of beer drinking, the molding and shaping of clay, of carved, sanded stone into containing vessels for beer and the enlivening it can bring here and now, an intersecting at the horizon line of the 4 directions, above and below which together make a circle, a sphere, here here. Here-ly/highly creative work, the royal road of dreams, working them, an ancient "trade" of "consciousness craft-workers" in all cultures through all ages. The alpenstein, so-called in Switzerland, or white stone- (alpen = white, thus the white snows which name the Alps) -stein is a symbol true. Beer in a stein is an everyday/everyman-woman drink of the masses, the workers, the "volks" of the world. And thus this little stein/stone, a worker's cup for inductive brew - beer is a goddess drink made of Her distilled grains and in some cultures, honey - keeps one in touch with the world, this world, the hard work of it where (no matter what preventions are taken, prayers made and actions forced, prescribed rituals performed and charms laid out) things fall apart, fall down, and one has to do a walkabout for awhile in his skivvies, staying close to the instincts (the "only-skivvies" image symbolizing instinctuality, creative organs and principles less filtered/disguised, skivvies a kind of container, too) but looking for the right clothes (symbols of adaptation to life) which make something of the stein/stone of one's life and self in response/obedience to the Self at play mercurially.

Just a word or two about white-alpen which a Jungian analyst recently pointed out to me is a color signifying the feminine principle, the Material, Earth/Creation dimension, the archetype of the Great Mother. In alchemy white can signify an alchemical phase called the albedo or the whitening which is a pulverizing, the making-most-small, the refinement to dust or fine white ash, white foliated earth, thus a symbol of a process of incarnation, materiality, matter, mater refined (and still or even more earth without devaluing the baser stuff, the gross of earthiness, what loving mothers do all the time with their "beloved little shitters and snotters, sleep blotter-outers," love, love (while taking deep breaths for patience), patiently refining, no matter the effluvium/the muddier, with and out of/up from the primitive consciousness of the child nurtured/channeled into ego, conscious self, thus become self-known creator and maker responding to what presents within and without rather than "only-just" reactions. And one cannot incarnate without a mater, a mudder, a mothering into the matter, and that mattering-forth which dreams (a form of desire, we touch upon logos here, the nous, the mind, the idea, the creative seed and masculine principle, entelechy) of bringing things to matter that matter in and between the deep blue see and me. There's no matter without a mater to matter us. Add this white to the stein/stone grabbed, perhaps even stolen, the cup itself then becomes an alchemical vessel in which the process unfolds/infolds which ensouls matter and matters soul on earth, ensues ensouled, once a meta-matter, into the realer in need of metta (compassion), itself hard, once fallen from heaven in need of earth, the clay and the "say" of its experience here upon/within harder/here-er stuff..."hard nose, the highway," as Van Morrison sings it, the way it is or appears to be, and certainly is real upon and beneath the skin.


Jung carved upon a stone in his garden, some words about an orphan, “I am an orphan, alone: nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.” In the text of this Jung-stone the orphan describes itself in part as "a white stone from heaven" fallen to earth...there is no room here for an extended amplification of this heavenly white stone's pointing-to (what symbols do) but to say only that it falls to earth "mortal for everyone [incarnated in and as everyone], yet is not touched by the cycle of aeons.” Falling is an image of coming down from above into material reality, incarnation, what is called coagulatio in alchemy. This process marks the dynamic moment when the high becomes low, ideal/idea/thought becomes act then takes on/brings about material form, limitation, quality and quantity, time and space (in this case thoughts become "things" or are capable of bringing things into material being as extensions and expressions of ideals/ideas/thoughts), giving material and symbolic (symbols are real!) heft to what was and is etheric, the "very or too light" and, limited in its "too-lightness," needs/longs for the low, the thinginess of mind and substance, form and function, compulsion, compunction and a bursting forth into some ever new expression from the conflagration come from mind and matter, spirit and flesh, air and earth, and on and on in these couplings, the opposites.


Poet William Blake says it very clear, that this "too lightness," let's call it Eternity, "is in love with the productions of time." He tells us in many of his poems to take care of the orphans, the lost children, the abandoned ones, the abject "littles" and "lambs" who seek reunion, inclusion and the effusion to be found in the "gardens of love" where uniqueness, individuating ones, can play and grow where "down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind. And...have God for [their] father & never want joy ("The Chimney Sweeper")." And love implies a longing for completeness brought about by the other-than-itself-or-one's- self which is not a static congealment but one which endlessly, in prick-and-puerperal principle, reproduces not just exact uniform copies but diverse, overflowing cornucopias of "little ones," varied, variant, verily valuable...Blake says/insists/counsels us to "tend to the little ones..." Thus in our tending eternity "falls from heaven, a white stone" an orphan stone, say, carved in Jung's garden speaking of these things imbued with and displaying reality, stones, hard, real and more real.

My little alpenstein of dream partakes, I think, in this mystery, my little mind, very small, can barely grab/grasp the preponderance of the small which gets low down and willfully refuses a King/Queen's crown and throne except that of "the prince willingly turned the pauper" choosing his/her stone upon which to sit and rule the ant, "a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity [Ezra Pound, Canto 81]"...

Crowned bairn of the barn, the chimney, the alley steep, wears the wreathed crown of pricks which downward brings blood, blood which affirms the reality, the here-ness thick, thusness of incarnate existence, wickedness a vital part, too, Eternity's lover, and vessel, and "shapely mind (consciousness)" with prehensile, yes, tail and hands/tales to give form and forth-ing to and of and for and with the "ten thousand things" which, O Buddha, sorry, are indeed real and not just false products of baseless mind, mere projections/ghosts, mere epiphenomena but rather these things, hard pressed down provided, provisional, base mind and matter ever dividing the swarming swarm teeming torn between the one and the many which partake of each, one or many armed. "Things that have hands take hands," says poet, Theodore Roethke, and thus eternity needs/makes hands/minds, takes hands/minds which take, too, take back, grasp, grab and delight/suffer the grubbiness of the reach, and the consummations thereof. Love plays and is played out in sequences and ever hints to that which extends love, greater's love, the more. But to dwell in "Love Abstract" and not act in tongued and lunge-ed love, is a bore. White stones fall from heaven sure in the need for dirt and time. Love there in the muck and the wash is love all the more because not "pure".

One, then, grabs a little suchness from a falling altar in pretentious postures ("Pull down thy vanity"), a white stone in the hand suffices a mystery, leaves the fishbowl one has confused for the universe, is driven from or abandons yon local central hill and value, a centaur wandering in skivvies and bones, an orphan alone yet everywhere, Kansas (is) Kansas even though "Baltimore gleams in supernatural ecstasy" (Allen Ginsberg, HOWL) yet "in woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons [C.G. Jung].”


Now, the dream stein is a souvenir. And souvenir is French for a remembrance or memory, a memento, keepsake or token of remembrance, an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. Dream work a la Jung (and others) involves working with memories of one's personal past as well as the "remembered" archetypes and symbols of the unconscious. Memories go deep. One reaches, excavates, as do dreams, for personal and collective memories, symbols and their associations which show up in life in order to ken meaning of things beyond what "just presents" but are precisely for what is presented here and now in a life. And dreams are progressive, intending growth, development, advancement, renewal and generativity/creativity. And most importantly, relationship/relatedness, I and other, I and not-I, I and (even) I...dreams expose often enough how we avoid relationship of all kinds (O Narcissus) and thus intrude/relate to us at night or other "in-trusion" which insista on relation. The goal is not grandiosity and escape via dissociation/inflation but the work is grand in the sense of most important and meaningful and available to one and all no matter class, age, education, cultural or spiritual caste and, apparently, species. Animals dream but to what end we can only speculate. As do we. We are caught in the speculum of the dream, the unconscious and may gather another view toward being and relatedness which serves greater and better purpose to more than our own species.

And my little stein/stone is just that, little, small, not very big, won't hold much so it keeps me practical and present with just who I am, Chaplin-esque grabbing at things to stabilize but they do fall. Old orders, structures break apart, burn, come down, and one walks about a bit dazed like Charlie, who nobly picks himself up, smooths back his hair, dusts himself off abit kicking up greater clouds of schmutz, coughing and sneezing, stepping out of the rubble head held high as if to say, "I meant to do that. Now where's my valet?" The I Ching says of the small thing in Hexagram 62, Preponderance of the Small: Success. Perseverance furthers. Small things may be done; great things should not be done. The flying bird brings the message. It is not well to strive upward. It is well to remain below. Great good fortune.

In many myths and religions it is the small, devalued thing of little repute which accomplishes the large, the great task or goal. With me we shall see but I have suffered the disease of my culture, god-almightiness and the need for acclaim. I hope I am done with all that. The dust and the wheeze may indicate some arrival for the departure from Olympus to where I am now, a dusty studio apartment counting pocket change for Kraft macaroni, 4 boxes a dollar at the Dollar Store. Life is good. Cheesy.

Seems I am often enough departing things, grandiose religious schemes and structures even of the spiritually advanced (or so they think)...my dreams have me regressing or re-vancing or de-vancing, and my own ridiculous pomposity is, really now, to be laughed at. Last night's dream of the wellness doc/spiritual healing man with his destructive "daughter of the damned" makes short work of my loftiness...seems the healing isin the destruction of nothing less than everything, the wholeness is in the breaking apart, the departing. Into the hinterlands once again or perhaps just to take up simple residence where one is and give up the pretensions and insolent grasping. Either way, I gotta breathe. And deal with the old rags once too proudly worn. Perhaps the most appropriate things to place upon any altar anywhere. Dylan again, "The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore..."



Fine with me. Perhaps tis Chaplin rapping, the repairman with his too long ladder and wobbly walk, very wary of ceilings, continually misspelling and misjudging gravity, who really makes me happy because human is all I ever am and shall be, an utter/eventual cloud of dust, scattered ashes, in Mexico at a highland spot most special to me. Thus, heretofore, or try, I'll be Chaplin-happy humping my way through the lumps and dumps carrying the remembrance stein/stone of the Self, even Its continual breaking apart into some other thingness held in the mind if not the hand which is memory unto wholeness/holdness with holes and cracks still here/there/somewhere or not, announced by a slight wheeze from too much collapsed altar and ceiling dust inbreathed, asthmatic and baby blue.







The first image of the essay is a painting, Escaping Criticism, by Pere Borrell del Caso, a Spanish Catalan painter (1835 – 1910). The images of Jung's Bollingen Stone and that of Jung are from Google images stock photos. Same for the painting of the Swiss beer stein still life, the lamb painting, and the Charlie Chaplin and the Anna Kamienska photos. All other images are Warren Falcon's photography, all rights reserved.

****[Some poems of Anna Kamienska:http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/kamienska.htm

Of Dispropriation to Adoration to Dispropriation/Dis-Enclosure to New Capacities for Gazing and/or Scattin' n Squintin' - Postmodernity's Bent Coin's Spent

For entertainment porpoises only

(skip ahead to 1:54 into video lol)

:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7DPsWUDEZM

The form of spirit as it awakens is adoration. 

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

September 24, 2024 - A post with a repost from a post posted last year, 2023, reviewing/recommending Jean-Luc Nancy's "scriptural text" - Adoration, The Deconstruction of Christianity II. You can read this post further down below THIS, today's posted fresh text, re-introducing Adoration (hey, not a bad idea, right - I prescribe Adoration - take two and call me in the morning):

"Our time is the time of a dispropriation."

Just in case, had to look it up to make sure I knew,

Dispropriate - to deprive of ownership

Jeez. Only that?

BUT ain't is so?

A few passages from Jean-Luc Nancy's Adoration, The Deconstruction Of Christianity II. Exquisite writing, inductive meditative reasoning -or as mystic monk Thomas Merton would say, and did, "thoughts out of season" - Nancy's masterful devoted pursuit of an often elusive labyrinthine quality of mind/consciousness articulations and parsings, wrong turns perhaps leading into the "other space" - resonant enclosure - which actually dis-incloses not only thought by following such into intuitive "off the obvious map" destinations of knowing as Dostoevsky's Alyosha prescribes going "with one's inside, with one's stomach", a fuller, more enriching embodied sense that is indeed, as the etymology of the word "religion/religious" indicates, a verb, a re-connecting, a linking back, a deep breach of ordinary "profane" and orthodox "sacred" (dogma, doctrine, this is the only right way) into timeless reach (a breaking, a breach) arrival into PRIMAL GROUND 

where one takes soundings then approximates but certainly knows where one is not, no longer trusting and dependent upon thought but "rides/drifts riffing and rifting the "map" which indeed, trite to say but true, "is not the territory"as there is no outside after all but I'm ahead of the flow here; being riven of rote meaning, and falling between liminal spaces between what once was meant, puts , risks, what is or was once foundation to more expansive purposes, and expensive too as such costs more than one can imagine, since language (which is image based) has structure utterly dependent upon deeper meta-structures (we call it, inadequately, "meaning"), resonant, fruct-ive, inductive, evoking massive intimate, subtle yet solid encounters that return existence to Existence (er....or....our selves to the Self aka Atman but still dependent upon swan dives and, most often, belly flops in dis- or un- covering) of what is hoped to be a "truing inclination/destination" arrival or at least hovering, circling "Esse/Etre" or Essence/Being, A or THE No Self as IT etre's/is's, structure-ish, ground-iloquential and BEYOND the Beguine, and cannot be confined to any particular-it experience of IT.

It is indeed "meta" aka "beyond" "apart" yet all is a part of IT (if IT implies/indicates a WHOLE or at least a more With IT Solid HOLD) (which is not a noun but, what, a Verb dependent upon AD-verb, modifications, but still more Verb - perhaps Hindus have it right-write with their approximations of such aka MAYA, THAT dance, as poet Ted Roethke writes, ..."slowing in the mind of man That made him think the universe could hum?" Or is it OM? OM HUM wha cha call it jiggly hoky pokery - must let Herman Melville chitter here from the Mobius Dick Schtick Juke Boxery:

"Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin',
That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!"

Ahoy OY and Alive Alive oh

So hum n fling us! cue Charlie Mingus! many ways to sound, dance, and trance is key to, at least, understanding all us we, and still we call it "awakening" (I most often call it FAT CHANCE for who indeed can actually live THERE in THAT, consciously so? Rare's the bird what knows itself as air):

Mingus "Moanin'" <— click here to hear

So take a dare. Try some Nancy, Jean-Luc. Yes, you'll break but results are worth the synapsistic ic ic challenges hard stares but to utter the now trite but still correct and righting Gertrude Stein, me changing one word from the trivialized snoot -

There is A there there.

But it ain't what you think. Or is but can't be easily scribbled.

We nibble at the edges of what is there, or nibble from within the enclosure, the old and reified meanings and structures of meaning in order to be, as Nancy says in Vol 1 of Deconstructing Christianity, disenclosed, un enclosed, freed into new possibilities and discoveries of what, this old saw and hard brick, "means"—

"I wanna ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I use my senses"

Roy Rogers, that cowboy romance, that fantasy still in American psyche, mythic, deranging beyond know arrangements and wranglements, sings our innate longing, our plea for disenclosure though "we have come to love our chains" of paradigms past their prime (good ol' Marx):.

Don't Fence Me In <— click here to hear

....perchance tah gaze at th' moon till ah looz mah senses....

HA! Only that!

AND. BUT. SO.

Take the effortful plunge and just go with Nancy though one may, no, WILL reread again and again and "break one's mind" on the snail's epheme-real liine-trace that Nancy seems to so easily "track" on our way intellectually and more back to where we already are, unknown support of what appears to be infinite, immeasurable and sustaining whether known consciously or not.

But this suchness can be more "gnown" as in gnossis which is knowing derived from the gut, one's own experience via more than one or two senses but even these do the job of expanding what we call, so limited is the word, "thought" or, best -

ENCOUNTER.

Ready to fall or sly, or both, into inductivities, awaken mystic (not bliss niinny) proclivities innate in hairless apes such as ourselves so full of our own mawkish prance about, hack Jack Horner's all, inflated, jaded, one-eyed gapers at our own dyspeptic banquet of Christmas pie deluded that we ourselves created the not only the pie, the plum, the thumb itself, but the entire Cosmos.  This is why we are undergoing despite our massive resistances a necessary and fated (consciousness IS fate) dispropriation - a deprivation of ownership. Or, as T. S. Elitot sings in his Four Quartets, "we must go by a way of dispossession."  All our musings and muster and mustard are undergoing massive withdrawal of what was understood for millennia as "meaning", as telos (purpose), as "what matters".

Nancy's efforts assist in the "disenclosure" that humans are globally (glub glub) undergoing we have gotten so way ahead of ourselves and our capacities to pace and digest the tyrant unleashed, the powers that humans as we are now, our still very primitive ID consciousness, can control in safe enough and mindful, circumspect ways.  It, the Beast, is disenclosed now, released unleashed into the masses, the mostly heedless and unconscious collective herd minded cybernauts/nuts ensnared/enmeshed in the maya web, weave, of pure and utter "distraction fits" (Eliot, again) caught, addicted, dependent upon the most odious and loathsome of postmodern malaise and second by second bedazzlement (and addled-ment) - TRENDING and BREAKING NEWS (spews). Enough.  I here prattle doggie paddling in the glyph-stream of a species dependent now upon Moloch Machine coding we hope, pray, depend upon to make our days and selves meaningful.  I heave to differ.  Here below is some Jean-Luc (I feel for him such affection as he sweetens my and our disaffection with cyber confection - see screen grabs selections from Nancy's Adoration further below or just scroll ahead and down to read them then return to this section immediately following).

"We don't need more humanism or democracy; we need to begin by questioning anew the entire thought of "man", returning it to the workshop." - Jean-Luc Nancy

September 23, 2023 

- Jean-Luc Nancy

My review from a few years ago when I first read-tread-Nancy's "threads" - his weave - warp woof - of what, that What that IS yet easily eludes our barely adequate senses (including "reason") to, perfect word here - GRASP (GROCK) the Invisible that gnocks or not yet seems, as poet Rilke says, to spin him a bit, "strangely seems to require us, the human, creation" for its own needs, it requires us to give it FACE(s).

Enough - this from last year which was/is a reprise from some years before last:

Yom Kippur. Two days of rain, darkened skies, and the surprise reminder of grace, of psychologically emptying one's pockets of the everyday and also of each and every fuzzball of lint, dust, the crusts accumulated by hands that do our human will's, our egos' bidding, all this is dumped, released, shaken out, handed over and into literal and/or symbolic cleansing river or body of water as an alchemical process of atonement both poetic AND noetic.

A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts. —Willard Van Orman Quine

A few words from C. G. Jung about "beside the water" moments - this passage from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung's autobiography, last chapter titled "Retrospect":

"When people say I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that amount to? I am not that stream . . . . There is a fine old·story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowadays no one can stoop so low."

One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream."

Now's a good time to read, reread, slow down, read a passage over yet again, wait for understanding of Jean-Luc Nancy's remarkable book, Adoration, The Deconstruction of Christianity II. One must (well, I must and have) develop an ongoing relationship with the book in order to reel in (impossible, I know) the Big Fish, or at least grasp a minnow or two from the massive cloud/school of fish that circles and obscures the Big Fish, think Melville and Moby, think swimming in "the Drink" of think and intuition, even a zen dropping/falling through into __________. It is possible. But conveying the experience is a challenge.

Anyhow, yada yada....o for capacities such as Nancy's to butterfly net, even fish net, the Nyet and yet the ineffable but alphabeti-ful.

"The form of the spirit as it awakens is adoration."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted by Nancy at the book's beginning.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Adoration/6JGUDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Here are a few "tease" selections/delectations from Nancy's Adoration.. 

Click on the selection for better reading::

And, as a bit of  lagniappe for the reader, the bold word French word, means "a little extra, the gift of it,  here is the Theodore Roethke poem I very partially quote in the review.  Should all the words above fail you then here is more than recompense for your kind and patient attention/attempt:

Four for Sir John Davies

1. The Dance 

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man 
That made him think the universe could hum? 
The great wheel turns its axle when it can; 
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room, 
And I have made a promise to my ears 
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears. 

For they are all my friends: I saw one slide 
Down a steep hillside on a cake of ice,— 
Or was that in a book? I think with pride: 
A caged bear rarely does the same thing twice 
In the same way: O watch his body sway!— 
This animal remembering to be gay. 

I tried to fling my shadow at the moon, 
The while my blood lept with a wordless song. 
Though dancing needs a master, I had none 
To teach my toes to listen to my tongue. 
But what I learned there, dancing all alone, 
Was not the joyless motion of a stone. 

I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; 
I take it, and I give it back again: 
For other tunes and other wanton beats 
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. 
Yes, I was dancing-mad, and how 
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

2. The Partner 

Between such animal and human heat 
I find myself perplexed. What is desire?— 
The impulse to make someone else complete? 
That woman would set sodden straw on fire. 
Was I the servant of a sovereign wish, 
Or ladle rattling in an empty dish? 

We played a measure with commingled feet: 
The lively dead had taught us to be fond. 
Who can embrace the body of his fate? 
Light altered light along the living ground. 
She kissed me close, and then did something else. 
My marrow beat as wildly as my pulse. 

I'd say it to my horse: we live beyond 
Our outer skin. Who's whistling up my sleeve? 
I see a heron prancing in his pond; 
I know a dance the elephants believe. 
The living all assemble! What's the cue?— 
Do what the clumsy partner wants to do! 

Things loll and loiter. Who condones the lost? 
This joy outleaps the dog. Who cares? Who cares? 
I gave her kisses back, and woke a ghost. 
O what lewd music crept into our ears! 
The body and the soul know how to play 
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.

3. The Wraith 

Incomprehensible gaiety and dread 
Attended what we did. Behind, before, 
Lay all the lonely pastures of the dead; 
The spirit and the flesh cried out for more. 
We two, together, on a darkening day 
Took arms against our own obscurity. 

Did each become the other in that play? 
She laughed me out, and then she laughed me in; 
In the deep middle of ourselves we lay; 
When glory failed, we danced upon a pin. 
The valleys rocked beneath the granite hill; 
Our souls looked forth, and the great day stood still. 

There was a body, and it cast a spell,— 
God pity those but wanton to the knees,— 
The flesh can make the spirit visible; 
We woke to find the moonlight on our toes. 
In the rich weather of a dappled wood 
We played with dark and light as children should. 

What shape leaped forward at the sensual cry?— 
Sea-beast or bird flung toward the ravaged shore? 
Did space shake off an angel with a sigh? 
We rose to meet the moon, and saw no more. 
It was and was not she, a shape alone, 
Impaled on light, and whirling slowly down.

4. The Vigil 

Dante attained the purgatorial hill, 
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw, 
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will,— 
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw? 
All lovers live by longing, and endure: 
Summon a vision and declare it pure. 

Though everything's astonishment at last, 
Who leaps to heaven at a single bound? 
The links were soft between us; still, we kissed; 
We undid chaos to a curious sound: 
The waves broke easy, cried to me in white; 
Her look was morning in the dying light. 

The visible obscures. But who knows when? 
Things have their thought: they are the shards of me; 
I thought that once, and thought comes round again; 
Rapt, we leaned forth with what we could not see. 
We danced to shining; mocked before the black 
And shapeless night that made no answer back. 

The world is for the living. Who are they? 
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm. 
She was the wind when wind was in my way; 
Alive at noon, I perished in her form. 
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: 
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

ALL PHOTOS ARE BY WARREN FALCON

Do not use without asking permission 

All photos were taken in the DIA Beacon Museum

located in Beason, NY.